Recently I heard about W3C Widgets, a term I had not heard about before. As you may know, widgets are small-size applications, usually built using web technologies, that can run on our computer desktop, web browser, websites and of course mobile devices or TVs. These applications generally perform small tasks like displaying news, weather or a clock; but nothing prevents them from being more sophisticated. Some time back I had played around with the widget format of the Opera browser. Those widgets are basically just HTML, CSS and Javascript packed in a .zip file (renamed to .wgt) along with a configuration file, which is great if you already know how to develop with these technologies! If you’re interested, have a look at the specification. In the newest release, Opera widgets can run independent from the browser like a native Windows application! They also have a widget engine for mobile phones.
I’ve seen similar things (like Google Gadgets), so I thought there will be many proprietary, non-interoperable widget formats from different vendors. And now the W3C is trying to add one more on top?! I was skeptical at first, but after reading this article I felt excited. It seems the W3C specification is driven by Opera and Vodafone who want to extend and standardize what Opera is already doing. Let’s see who will adopt this format; maybe we’ll have a great open platform for lightweight applications soon.
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